IC 2219

IC 2219 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cancer about 243 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 82,000 ly, about 82% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 5,163 km/s.

Because its light is 243 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2219 as it looked roughly 243 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).